I have a writing workspace in downtown Brooklyn. It keeps me honest because there’s a giant picture of Toni Morrison benignly and regally staring at you and it’s full of writers glaring at their computers in angst so you feel bad if you’re just doom-scrolling Twitter.
Anyway, on my walk there, I pass CHiPS, a group that feeds the hungry. Today was miserable, with angry misty cold rain and a dark sky. The line at CHiPS was out the door. It was exclusively made up of Black people and asylum seekers waiting in the rain.
What is our Democratic city and state leadership doing about poverty and hunger in New York? Well, Mayor Eric Adams is helping elect Donald Trump by demonizing asylum seekers. He keeps flooding the subways with cops. The cops play on their phones and harass homeless people and teenagers that jump the turnstile. Now, they’re supposed to start checking people’s bags.
And now, Governor Kathy Hochul is sending the National Guard into the city’s train system to check bags. Oh, and she wants to ban people with violent crime records from using public transportation.
Reduce crime by making it impossible for people to get to their jobs or school. Got it!
“This is another unfortunate example of policymaking through overreaction and overreach,” Donna Lieberman of NYCLU said. “These heavy-handed approaches will, like stop-and-frisk, be used to accost and profile Black and Brown New Yorkers, ripping a page straight out of the Giuliani playbook. Today’s announcement fails to address longstanding problems of homelessness, poverty, or access to mental health care.”
“This plan is whiplash inducing. The city only recently trumpeted safety data. Sound policy making will not come from overreacting to incidents that, while horrible and tragic, should not be misrepresented as a crime wave and certainly don’t call for a reversion to failed broken windows policies of the past.”
“We need leadership that will treat New Yorkers in crisis with dignity, not restrict their right to travel to their jobs, families, or the very healthcare providers and social supports they may need to help them get back on their feet.”
As Sam Haselby pointed out on Twitter (I’m only human!):
Tom Cotton called for the deployment of the National Guard in a NYT op ed and it got James Bennett fired. Now New York Governor Kathy Hochul is doing it, for no apparent reason, and I guess it's fine.
***
While I was writing this a friend sent me video of a protest of an event by Kirsten Gillebrand. “Whole thing is pretty intense. Democrats are cooked.” He’s right. Young people strategically dispersed throughout the crowd scream at her about dead kids, demand a ceasefire and shout out her lump bribe from AIPAC, which is $336,000.
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